Marcia - 4:38 pm on May 21, 2002 (gmt 0)

>>If you work really hard to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains.

GoogleGuy, let's put it this way. If your wife collects chickens and you're shopping for chicken appliance covers for her, how enhancing to the shopping experience will it be to find banner exchanges on the page for the 100 top crafts sites (by click-votes) or candles or soap? Or a contest site or WAHM link partners? It's out of context, slows load time, and imho is downright irritating. It's more than just losing page rank, it's losing relevancy. With a kazillion link exchange banners on a homepage or product page, it might get link traffic (which may or may not be targeted) but most likely will lose potential customers.

My logic, which of course could be wrong, says it's better to put those on one relevant page for those who might be interested in visiting those other type of sites. That keeps the in and out balance the same without diluting the value of the site's pages and being annoying to boot.

Aside from PR, neither does it seem to make sense to have navigation on every page of a site linking to every other page on a large site - like the links or shipping policy. Especially with graphical links, again - the pages are slowed down for no reason.

buckworks, it's not altogether altruistic. If there's a site selling socks that has a page done up linking to sites selling shoes, if it pulls in traffic for people looking for shoes, they will find info on shoes, but they may just stay and buy some socks while they're there. But it's still consistent and at least close enough to theme.

To hunt down links for Page Rank + other value, doesn't it make sense to find link exchanges that way - non-competing but related? But they don't need to be sprinkled all over the site, I can't see the sense in that.